It is interesting how many players around the world rely on the Pi method to generate their lottery numbers. What’s harder to believe is that many lottery players swear by PI and have found winning tickets with this strategy! This National Pi Day, we decided to run the numbers and see if we could find a winner!
Getting Started with the Lottery & Pi
The theory when choosing numbers to play from the figures of Pi is to take a long string of digits and select lottery numbers to play from. It is recommended to play the numbers in order when buying a ticket so as to confirm you’re playing the right chosen numbers. We found that if you compare with past results some numbers tended to match up, but we couldn’t find a ticket where all the numbers could be made into a jackpot win. Sometimes such numbers hit here and there enough to make a few hundred or a few thousand enough to recoup the losses from our theoretical game pot.
So to start, we looked at the figures of Pi, which you can see below.
π: 3.1415926535897932384626433832795
And we took the first five numbers from the initial part of the string:
3, 14, 15, 59, 26
Before we go too far, it’s important to remember that there are a few ways to draw the balls depending on the overall count on a specific lottery game. But if we’re going with the lottery with the lowest number ratio we may be able to narrow results down slightly. With Thunderball, whose count ranges from 1 to 39, you could have four different versions to choose from:
- 3 14 15 9 2 6
- 3 14 1 5 9 2
- 31 41 5 9 2 6
- 31 4 15 9 26 5
But the exact number doesn’t really matter because it is dwarfed by the possible ball draw order. If we extend that out to a “6 from 49” lottery the odds are basically half of those a 39 ball lottery. So to make things easier we started working with a Pi Coder and Generator to keep our fingers off the calculator.
Generating Pi Numbers for Lotto Prediction
In this next challenge, we decided to pick the first 20 digits of Pi:
3.1-4-1-5-9-2-6-5-3-5-8-9-7-9-3-2-3-8-4-6
But to make things easier, we’re removing the 3, leaving only the decimal.
1-4-1-5-9-2-6-5-3-5-8-9-7-9-3-2-3-8-4-6
Removing all possibility of numbers over 45, and restricting the idea of double numbers you can have multiple number sequences from this chain alone, we found over 30 before stopping because we ran out of paper, see if you can find more!
Lottery & Pi Opinions
The lottery formula of Pi is a sound one and I think it’s a fun activity for picking your numbers to see which ones come up the most. This could be a good method for those that like to run the numbers themselves to find winners, but personally, I think I still prefer checking hot and cold numbers on a reliable website than doing all the legwork myself, especially if you have a lot of tickets you want to play. It is tough to trust generators without seeing the RNG for yourself however so if you have a moment, grab a pen and paper and see which combinations you can find for the lottery and Pi!